The present invention relates to an ultrasound diagnostic apparatus and an ultrasound image producing method and particularly to an ultrasound diagnostic apparatus having a battery to supply power to each component of an ultrasound probe and a diagnostic apparatus body.
Conventionally, ultrasound diagnostic apparatuses using ultrasound images have been employed in the medical field. In general, this type of ultrasound diagnostic apparatus comprises an ultrasound probe having a built-in transducer array and an apparatus body connected to the ultrasound probe. The ultrasound probe transmits an ultrasonic beam toward the inside of a subject's body, receives ultrasonic echoes from the subject, and the apparatus body electrically processes the reception signals to produce an ultrasound image.
In such ultrasound diagnosis, various examinations such as B-mode examination, M-mode examination, CF-mode examination and PW-mode examination are performed. In recent years, an ultrasound diagnostic apparatus capable of these examinations has been reduced in size by adopting an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) or a processor and is applied as a mobile ultrasound diagnostic apparatus, for example. However, when those various examinations are carried out by a single apparatus, since signal processing, image processing or other processing requires many arithmetic operations, there is a problem that processing speed of the apparatus decreases.
As a technology for improving the processing speed, ultrasound diagnostic apparatuses which perform parallel arithmetic operations using a large number of arithmetic cores in signal processing and the like have been proposed, as disclosed in JP 2006-174902 A.
The apparatus disclosed in JP 2006-174902 A divides a measurement region into plural regions in a scanning line direction, and assigns an arithmetic core to each of the divided regions, whereby image processing is carried out in a parallel fashion in the scanning line direction, and thus the processing speed can be improved.
However, there is a demand for further improvement of processing speed in the recent ultrasound diagnosis which is becoming more and more complicated, like in the case where two or more examinations such as B-mode examination, CF-mode examination and PW-mode examination are simultaneously executed.